Technology

Nah, it was somewhat of a joke about the built-in but locked away infotainment systems.

You know how expensive it is to mold unique dedicated physical buttons for every function and then wire them all over the place?

Not expensive. You don't have to "wire them all over the place", you just put them on a PCB and connect them to the nearest CAN bus, or similar.

Cars cost way too much for me to care about this excuse.

You can even have that single display collect so much car user data and sell that too

As well as the pure cost saving there was also the notion that it was a futuristic look that would sell, and so boost profits that way, too.

And probably it did sell and market well - for a while.

I feel that consumers had become too trusting of carmakers - after all, cars have been getting better and better in terms of their usability for decades, so when carmakers went touchscreen everything, the first instinct of the average consumer would be to trust it and assume it represented an improvement."They wouldn't do it if it was worse, right?"

And so people buy the fancy futuristic car with no buttons, and only after driving it for a month does it sink in how much they truly hate it, and that they got sold a lie.

So there was always going to be that one generation of touchscreen-everything, before the people who got burnt by it are now the ones thinking "I won't buy anything again that doesn't have some buttons!"

Without actually knowing how much constructing the physical buttons cost, I would guess that the real savings are in process optimization - if all you have for the interface is a screen, then you don't need to have the interface design done before constructing the car - you can parallelize these tasks.

Insufficient as far as justifications go, but understandably lucrative.

OTOH now we will get to enjoy dashcam videos of car rollovers where the driver is like, Where's that playlist... OH GOD OH SHIT !!!

And it looks nice.

So, you’re saying that a touchscreen where you have actively look at because you don’t have any haptic feedback is saver on the roads?

My uncle's outback looks like a video slot machine, and everything had to be done through the touchscreen. But to add insult to injury, the Subaru touchscreens are super slow and unresponsive, so they feel like they aren't working.

Yep. And mazda has physical climate button/knobs, with a physical dial to control the infotainment (it's pretty convenient, if a bit of an older design on most of their vehicles).

I got in right before Subaru went that way and ended up with the best of both worlds: a touchscreen for CarPlay and knobs for...everything else. I still have knobs for the radio if need be.

Plus it's a six speed manual (Crosstrek).

I get a flyer from the dealership every other week asking if I want to "upgrade." Sorry, fellas, nothing you have is an upgrade to me. You can't get a manual gearbox here any more.